Prior to release, Gearbox promised us plenty of additional DLCs for Borderlands 2. The first of the expected add-ons introduces us to a brand-new class / playable character.

Meet Gaige of the ‘Mechromancer’ class. The redhead seems to have a thing for robots, as her all-time best friend Deathtrap not only gives her a unique twist, but is the main Action Skill.

She is also quite different from the conventional classes because of her highly expansive and versatile Skill Trees.

This guide gives you some suggestions on how to build the Mechromancer in various ways. Do note that these builds tend to work best in co-op – but that doesn’t mean they can’t be used effectively in solo play.

Perhaps the most loved thing about Gaige is her brilliant Best Friends Forever tree. Heck, all three trees offer a ridiculous amount of goodies to her, but this specific one tends to make Deathtrap a lot scarier for enemies than he already is.

This is because towards the end of its development, you get the Sharing is Caring skill, which along with Make it Sparkle (not used in the build) are the two best skills for Gaige.

I recommend taking that lone point in Anarchy in the start – it does tend to decrease your accuracy greatly, but know that Gaige isn’t a sniper or long-ranged character; she’s best with SMGs or shotguns. Thus, Anarchy can be of great use, particularly with Deathtrap deployed and Gaige firing away. You’ll just have to remove your pre-reloading habit to make it highly effective though.

After that, it’s really just about going down through the BFF tree as quickly as possible. Some people like to invest fully in ‘The Better Half’ so that it combines well with Anarchy, but there really is no use of doing that when you are focusing on getting Deathtrap as good as possible.

The rest of the points go in Little Big Trouble for some nice Elemental Damage and also to give some neat tricks to Deathtrap from The Stare and Strength of Five Gorillas.

We shift the spotlight from the Best Friends Forever tree to the Little Big Trouble one, but with some generous investment in Ordered Chaos to get some utility buffs.

There isn’t much to say here really, except that you should focus on delivering as much elemental damage as possible. When you deploy Deathtrap, make sure you fully utilize the Upshot Robot to keep him there for as long as possible.

Robot Rampage will further make Deathboy more lethal, and the other neighboring skills in the Ordered Chaos tree should help your gun-wielding skills. Discord in my opinion works fantastic and is a great for balancing out the accuracy debuff from Anarchy. If you feel your weapon is getting out of hand due to Anarchy stacks, you can reload midway to get some buffs from Discord.

Blood Soaked Shield is probably the most powerful defensive ability in the game. Sure, you do lose a portion of your health, but it is particularly helpful when on low health (note that it takes out 5% of your CURRENT health, meaning you can almost never run out of health just by this skill). Borderlands 2 players will know that Shields are more reliable defenses than your beefy health.

This is a jack-of-all-trades build – very simple, yet very effective. If you don’t want to over-rely on Deathtrap yet have him for those special occasions, this build should suit you greatly.

The skills from BFF will give some decent buffs. Notice though, that none of the skills have more than 3 points in them in that tree. This is because our main focus in BFF is only Upshot Robot – the rest of the investments were just so we could get it.

In the Little Big Trouble tree, our main skills to get are Shock & AAAGHH and The Stare, while in the Ordered Chaos tree you are looking for Anarchy, Robot Rampage, Discord, and Rational Anarchist.

Rational Anarchist is a funny little skill. It can really help you get some burst damage, or it can completely ruin a well-aimed shot. So, make sure to have the right weapon equipped for the right situation to trigger its effect.

The quoted lines pretty much sum up this build. If you look at it initially, it’ll seem very strange because of the weird point distribution in Ordered Chaos. However, it actually isn’t.

The OC tree gives you some abnormal but very, very useful abilities like Anarchy, Discord, Rational Anarchist, and Blood Soaked Shield. This actually makes it one of the most powerful trees in the entire game, provided the user understands these abilities.

But the weirdest thing that this tree does is give you Wild Claw. It’s really difficult to understand what exactly Wild Claw does until you actually see it in action. Basically, it’s a retarded sort of a melee attack that gives you a large amount of health back, proportional to the amount of health you DON’T have.

This works best in an offensive-defensive styled skirmish. We’ve already discussed that Gaige is best with SMGs and Shotguns, and thus it’s natural to use her in close-ranged combat. But that also opens up a lot of risk for you, and thus it’s important that you have something that works for you in close-ranged.

It is this very reason that makes Wild Claw actually more important and less retarded than it sounds. Combine it with Blood Soaked Shield and you get a Mechromancer with a rampaging robot who just can’t die.

One of the long time staff at SegmentNext, Haider is an integral part of the team with a love for writing, playing guitar, and aviation.
Apart from writing for us, Haider is also a competitive FPS player and also enjoys exotic RPG games like Diablo and Xenogears (his favorite game of all time) on the side.